The Amarok team needs your help. Amarok are looking for a new, shiny and fresh jingle to play at first start of Amarok 2.0 and are holding a contest to find one. Magnatune and ccMixter have generously offered their help to get this going. The Amarok project will award the winner with fame, glory and a load of cool prizes, including $100 US dollars in cash and cool Amarok swag. The 2 runners up take away some swag as well. Read on for the rules of the contest.

So take some songs from the Magnatune pool, get mixing and submit your jingle at ccMixter.org

Judgment will be done by a totally-biased panel of Amarok people!

A few boring words on licensing...

As this jingle will be distributed along with Amarok 2.0, by non-commercial as well as commercial distributions, the jingle needs to be released under the Creative Commons by-sa license.

Magnatune has allowed Amarok jingles using their samples to be released under this license. However if you use samples from any other source, they need to be under the correct licence or Amarok cannot use it.

Good luck in your efforts to help us make Amarok 2.0 rok the experience of music lovers everywhere!

The splash screen can be turned off, the jingle from what I hear will only play during initial startup and can be turned off. If you're put off by such tiny additions to an app, you're really failing to consider the bigger things it has to offer.

I agree with your assessment concerning the splash screen and the jingle, but I have yet to find a setting to turn of that nasty animation in the playlist where the selection indicator would change color all the time...

I'm not sure I notice Amarok's splash screen at all. It starts up automatically when I log in, along with Kontact and Kopete. It's not like it uses a whole lot of resources when you aren't using it. Or maybe it does, but I hardly notice it with my fairly moderate 1 GB of RAM.

...just sit around refreshing the dot waiting to find a new article to complain in? Almost every article these days, the first post is almost always some inane complaint.

Its tiring me out and I'm not even a KDE dev (yet... I'm working on changing that) I feel sorry for the people who put in all this hard work and seem to get nothing but stupid complaints (come on, really you don't use an application because of a splash screen? that can be turned off!)

I can't wait to hear how some of these jingles turn out. I assume this is the track that will be default loaded the first time the Amarok2 is run?

Complaining about trivial things (such as things you have the option to turn off) seem pretty contrary to me.

However, in the digests, I think people should have the right to express positive and negative sentiments towards changes that are occurring. I believe constructive criticism can be made vastly more tactfully than it has been, but that doesn't mean that we should only heap positive praise on the project.

I love KDE. I try to convert everyone I can. I am extremely grateful that I receive this product free, and that it keeps getting better.

However, unless users voice what they are looking for, developers don't necessarily know.

I have nothing against negative opinions about things, its just the recent influx of comments that are basically a one comment to the effect of '{whatever} sucks'. Critical assessment is an absolutely essential part of a community process, but it should be discussed and supported by useful arguments, not just spewed out and walked away from.

A good example are some of the comments on the recent blog post about the start of a cursor theme for oxygen http://blog.ruphy.org/?p=16 If you look at Troy's comment, it is critical of an aspect of the theme but he supports his comment with a reasoned argument.

I am with you there. Sometimes, it concerns me that so many clueless people put so much time into bitching and whining and so little time into actually getting informed. Putting up this kind of FUD here puts off developers, it doesn't improve things.

On the other hand, I think it's quite cool we allow comments on our primary news outlet :>

I don't really find that it is a symptom of the dot, but of the internet as a whole. It is really difficult to find any thread on the internet without anger, elitism, and other disrespectful speech. As you move to more hard-core forums, the disrespectful speech reaches massive proportions. I find it odd...you would think geeks could have intelligent conversations without reverting to calling each other "fanboys".

But I have to say...compared to other geek forums, I am actually more amazed at the amount of love and kudos that KDE *does* receive on the dot. I guess that is the bright side.

Hi, talking about Amarok : did anyone else observe that amarok tries to send information with kmail without user (a.k.a. me) agreement ??
I noticed that because Amarok was trying to open kmail... but kmail is not installed!

I would like to get that kmail crash thing as optional to get turned off. I dont like that when amarok crash (when or if) it starts opening kmail what takes a while for some reason. I like to send those but not always.......

Dive in the code and change it for yourself. It's such a trivial thing it's a waste of time and user interface space to turn THAT into an option... How often does Amarok crash anyway, and you'll get OR the KDE crash dialog OR the kmail one - which only takes slightly longer to start than the normal crash handler.